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Review

Some great directors, as they age, strive
to simplify and refine their technique in the hope of getting closer to
their subjects, but Martin Scorsese has happily—perhaps even with
relief—moved into a long and not so emotionally taxing formalist phase
(with fat studio paychecks). He seems to have been drawn to Shutter Island by the chance to quote from quasi-horror asylum B movies like Shock Corridor and Bedlam,
and to play the kind of straight-ahead illusion-versus-reality games he
leaped clean over in his early expressionist masterpieces Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.
Dennis Lehane’s novel, about a Boston detective who travels to an
insane asylum on a craggy island to investigate the disappearance of a
female patient, is a doodle, a Paul Auster Lite breather between his
tortured Mystic River and the panoramic The Given Day.
But Scorsese draws it out to two hours and twenty minutes of
Hitchcock-like tracking shots and bombastic music and shrieking storms
and detectives in long coats and fedoras trudging past leering mental
patients. It’s all deliberately artificial, of course, and the fifties
noir tropes do gradually morph into something weirder and more
hallucinatory. But even when the detective-story foundation begins to
crumble and the gumshoe protagonist (Leonardo DiCaprio) becomes racked
with visions of concentration camps and bloody children and babbles
about Communist subversives and Nazi experiments, Shutter Island is still suffocatingly movieish.

DiCaprio had a breakthrough in the much-maligned Reservation Road:
He sanded off some layers of polish and dared to be raw, wobbly, in the
moment. He’s every bit as good here—he’s just not very interesting. He
trudges around with his sidekick (Mark Ruffalo) interviewing characters
played by great actors pretending to be bad actors (only Ruffalo and
Ben Kingsley’s strangely paternal psychiatrist are fun to watch), and
it’s all setup for the big reveal of the last 25 minutes. The ending is
powerful (it should be, given how Scorsese lingers on the corpses of
little kids), but Shutter Island is a long slog. The sad
thing is that Scorsese could have connected emotionally with Lehane’s
narrative. Without spelling things out, the story comes down to whether
fierce self-dramatization can lead to revelation, catharsis, and
healing—a question raised obliquely in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. But Scorsese can’t get past the thicket of old movies. He’s farther from reality than his hero is.
— David Edelstein